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Bezig met laden... Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2018)door Lucy Mangan
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. The author was funny, but the spoilers, my goodness! There were virtually no warnings. Why?! Why do readers spoil books for other readers? At about 54%, the author mentions that she's going to talk about [b:Anne of Green Gables|8127|Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1)|L.M. Montgomery|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1615094578l/8127._SY75_.jpg|3464264]. I haven't finished that series yet, and I don't want to read the spoilers that are apparently inevitable with Mangan. I'm so disappointed. I guess this is a biblio-memoir. I enjoyed a trip down memory lane as many of the books the author read and loved (or in some cases didn't) as a child mirrored my own childhood reading. There were authors I disagreed on (Dr Seuss) and those I agreed on (Blyton) but overall it was fun to be reminded of them. I was probably less interested in the authors own family story, and in the bits about books I wasn't familiar with. Were you a bookworm as a kid? I was. I was even voted "Class Bookworm" in 7th grade - a category they made up just for me. I was the kid with the book inside the text book during school lectures. So when I saw this a few years ago, I thought ... maybe. As much as I enjoy most books about books, I figured the title was likely to be an overstatement and I'd be reading a sedate, literary criticism of childhood books. The front flap reinforced this suspicion. Which is why it sat on my shelves for so long. Oh, how wrong - and kinda right - I was. Lucy Mangan is a true bookworm; back in the day, she'd have given me a run for the title and the award. She was also way better read than I was, so there is some lit criticism here, but it's fabulous lit criticism; she's hilarious and she's rational and she's so very real. On Enid Blyton: I can barely bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton. Like generations of children before me, and like generations since (she still sells over 8 million copies a year around the world) I fell head over heels in love. No, not love - it was an obsession, an addiction. It was wonderful. It was an older girl that got me into the stuff. Becky- next- door lent me her copy of something called Five on a Secret Trail. It was a floppy, late 1970s Knight Books edition with, I believe, the original 1950’s illustrations inside. I read it. It was good. Very good. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. I asked Becky if she had any more. She did. It was called Five Run Away Together. I read it. It was good. Very good. Possibly even better than Five on a Secret Trail. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. I noticed it had a number '3' on the spine. Five on a Secret Trail had a '15’. What did that mean? I decided to look for clues. Even without a loyal canine companion to help me, it didn't take long. The endpapers carried a list. Apparently Enid Blyton had written twenty-one books! What excellent news! What riches! What vital. absolutely essential riches! I took the news and the list to my parents. I'm going to need all of these,' I said, gently. And so it began. And on C.S. Lewis' Narnia series being a Christian allegory: The tale of Lucy Pevensie discovering the secret world beyond the wardrobe door is a story about courage, loyalty, generosity, sacrifice and nobility versus greed, conceit, arrogance and betrayal. You can call the former Christian virtues, or you can just call them virtues, let the kids concentrate on the self-renewing Turkish delight, magically unerring bows and hybrid man-beasts and relax. Reading this, I feel like I missed out on something amazing by not living down the road from Lucy. I suspect we'd have had a lot of fun swapping books and comparing notes. But it was a joy to read her memoirs now and in so doing take a trip down the memory lane of my own reading. Mangan primarily recounts her childhood reading in a fun and often funny style, but she also dips lightly into the historical aspects of Children's literature here and there, when the subject matter seems to call for it - a specific genre, or the roots of illustrations. These bits are less engaging, more straightforward, and in context with the whole, makes the pace drag a tiny bit when you get to them. They're interesting, but they're not entertaining. Because Mangan's writing style is very conversational, the sentences that include many clauses and often long parentheticals can sometimes be hard to follow. This was probably my only criticism - not that I didn't enjoy the style, because I absolutely did - it's just once or twice, by the time the sentence ended, I had forgotten how it began. Admittedly, a large number of the books that Lucy Mangan covers are books unknown to me. I expected this because she was growing up in London, and I was growing up in tiny town Florida. But I was delighted at how often our book titles did converge, and how many titles that, even if I didn't read them, I was familiar enough with to easily follow along. The author has written a few other books, and I enjoyed this one so much, that I'm interested to discover what they're about and see about getting my hands on one or two.
... It's this ability to capture the powerful effect of certain books on a young reader's psyche that makes Bookworm so effective, whether Mangan is writing about the terror of reading dystopian fiction during the last years of the Cold War, or making a qualified case for Enid Blyton as a potential reader's gateway drug. What could easily have been the literary equivalent of one of those 'I love the 1980s' programmes in which comedians trigger our nostalgia buttons by merely mentioning the name of forgotten favourites is instead an insightful exploration of what books can do for us, written in a way that retrospectively illuminates our reading lives. I hadn't realised that the first time I encountered the German concept of Sehnsucht, or an aching yearning, was not, as I had thought, in Edgar Reitz's 1993 epic Die Zweite Heimat, but in Philippa Pearce's beautifully melancholy Tom’s Midnight Garden. And Mangan perfectly captures a crucial element of Richmal Crompton's untouchable William books – not only are they incredibly funny, but the language in which they're written makes no concessions to the youth of her readers. Without our knowing it, William was our introduction to sophisticated adult writing. As Mangan writes, "I was on a great polysyllabic spree, a grand tour around the glories of the subordinate clause. William was my guide, my inspiration and the gatekeeper to a new and better world. The suburbs suddenly expanded to infinity." ...
In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)028.55092Information Library and Information Sciences Books and Reading Reading of young; Juveniles For Specific InterestsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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This book is quite simply a nostalgic memory fest of all the books, so many of them now classics, that enriched both our childhoods - and in my case, the early motherhood years as well. The true friends and teachers that books become for the bookish child is so well celebrated here. They give the lie to a certain grandson's infamous exclamation last year - 'Books? They're so 1950s!' You're wrong Alex. A well-loved book is a friend forever. ( )